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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 5535000" data-attributes="member: 27160">Like what?  I honestly see none - none that could not be done with an offline builder, I mean.  And I see some functionality that is very likely lost.  The ability to add houserule content (new feats, custom items, new races) in the old CB was limited - but at least it was there.  It needed expanding (and, indeed, it has been, after the fact), not removing entirely.  I don't see how, practically, this is going to be possible with the new CB.  With an offline CB, you get space on every user's hard drive to store those houseruled elements; with the new builder, you get WotC's servers - are they really going to let X thousand users store their house creations there??The "cloud" is about virtualisation to allow asset sharing within datacentres, not to give any particular runtime advantages.  Occasionally, you can find such advantages for specific applications - but I don't see RPG support software as any of those.Mac users could use (were using) emulators; not ideal (basically WotC picked the wrong language to start with), but not really all that far from downloading SilverLight to run the new one on.Well, since the new CB's database structure is pretty much identical to the old one (i.e. they re-used it), I don't imagine it would be very different either way.Sure - but that could work just as well with offline facilities for creating content to upload to the software that actually gains something from being online - like the VTT.  Character files (and I imagine similar for the monster files) are really not that big.Yeah, that's probably true, but:I think this was tied into the web CB in that the timing of the change was driven by Dark Sun and Essentials (don't want those in the old CB 'cos we want to force people onto the new one), so the rush was all precipitated by the desire to strong-arm users onto a platform that suited WotC instead of giving the paying customer the best possible functionality, adaptability and quality.  There's the fatal error and cardinal sin all rolled into one, from my perspective.I don't know about the actual rules engine, but the data structures for the old CB are quite good, actually - flexible and they seem well thought out.  They even kept using them for the new CB <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Actually, it is.  See if you can grasp this: supplying the product to one more user costs WotC close to nothing.  Zero.  Zip.  If it cost them a penny, your assertion would hold water, but it doesn't.  What costs is the development, and that costs what it costs regardless whether 100 people use the software or 1,000,000 people use it.  If you can get even a buck out of those million people, you are ahead of even quite an exhorbitantly contributing 100.  I have no clue what the actual user figures are (in the tens of thousands, it seems, but we can't say closer than that), but the fact remains that for every extra user that you can get any money out of at all, you gain in this situation.  The schema they had was fairly well designed from this persective - apart from maybe the minimum subscription period being too short or there being no one-off "startup cost".  Those with disposable income could do what I did and subscribe annually, ongoing, and get all the DDI benefits, all the time.  Those with less income or just not such keen fans could 'dip in' to keep fairly up-to-date and pay less (but pay something - which is better than nothing because servicing the customer costs WotC close to nothing).So, apart from putrid snobbish bigotry, what reason might there be to say "those with less to spend don't deserve this stuff"?</blockquote>

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